


sweet music playing (in the dark)

by singsongsung



Category: Little Women (2019), Little Women Series - Louisa May Alcott
Genre: Character Death, F/M, sadly there is always a character death in little women fic that deals with canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-06
Updated: 2020-04-06
Packaged: 2021-03-01 05:47:12
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,124
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23499982
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/singsongsung/pseuds/singsongsung
Summary: Laurie first sees Amy at Orchard House, the March home a bustle of activity as both hands on the clock inch closer to midnight.He firstseesAmy some time later.
Relationships: Theodore Laurence/Amy March
Comments: 63
Kudos: 538





	sweet music playing (in the dark)

**Author's Note:**

> To paraphrase _Brooklyn 99's_ Rosa Diaz: I've only had Amy/Laurie for a week but if anything ever happened to them I would kill everyone in this room.
> 
> This follows/fills in some blanks of the 2019 film. 
> 
> Title from Hozier's "Almost (Sweet Music)."
> 
> The only thing I ever want to do any more is talk about my _Little Women_ feelings - hit me up on tumblr if you feel the same! You can find me at rivervixens.

_there's been a lot of talk of love_  
_but that don't amount to nothin'_  
_you can evoke the stars above_  
_but that doesn't make it something_

_and the only way to last_  
_and the only way to live it_  
_is to hold on when you get love_  
_and let go when you give it_

\- stars, "hold on when you get love and let go when you give it"

Laurie first sees Amy at Orchard House, the March home a bustle of activity as both hands on the clock inch closer to midnight, Marmee issuing instructions (including one to him: _call me Mother, or Marmee_ ), Meg and Jo talking over each other, Beth serious in her role as nurse as she rests ice against Meg’s ankle.

Amy is young, and dressed for bed, a shawl pulled hastily around her shoulders atop a frilly nightgown. There are creases from bedlinens along one of her cheeks, and her braids on that same side of her head are mussed. She looks up at him with shining, starry eyes, like she’s been pulled from one dream and set into another.

“I’m Amy,” she says. The small smile on her lips is a funny thing; it looks like it could be holding secrets.

The world around Laurie is hectic and blurry, bursting with warmth, voices lilting upward and words turning into laughter. He feels like he’s stepped into a hidden realm, and by some miracle, been welcomed.

“Hello,” he says to Amy, and her smile pushes itself further up into her flushed cheeks.

He first _sees_ Amy some time later, at his own home, standing in the snow outside a window, for once without all her sisters. Laurie tends to think of the March girls as a unit, and it’s striking: Amy, on her own, pacing back and forth, does not look incomplete. When he calls out to her, she blathers tearfully about her feet, her face the picture of distress, and then lifts a hand, her palm red and broken.

They usher her inside; Laurie takes her hat, and John sits her down to start tending to her hand. As he cleans up her cuts ( _my wounds_ , Amy laments with an ache in her voice, her eyes impossibly wide), she digs her teeth into her bottom lip, wincing, and the fingers of her free hand curl into her skirt.

Perched on at ottoman at her left, gangly legs sprawled out lazily, Laurie reaches out tentatively, uncurling her fingers from her skirt and wrapping his own fingers around them. The skin atop her hand is chilled, slightly chapped along her knuckles from the cool weather, but her palm is warm, soft, a touch damp with sweat. She looks at him gratefully with those wide eyes when he takes her hand, turning her head away from John’s careful application of a bandage.

He’s not sure what he’s meant to do. “You’re alright,” he ends up murmuring, somewhat uselessly, and Amy’s eyes dart up to his again. She nods, like in speaking those words he’s made it so.

“There,” John says with finality, finished with the bandage.

“Will I lose my hand?” Amy asks him, and when he tells her, “No,” on a low chuckle, she hops to her feet, suddenly much more spritely. Her hand stays clasped in Laurie’s when she stands, falling from his only when she moves away, peering about the room curiously.

“You have so many paintings,” she says, and stops with a squeal of a gasp in front of an open art catalogue his grandfather has been browsing through. “You have _books_ of paintings,” she breathes, like she’s found something magical. The sound in her voice reminds Laurie of the feeling in his heart on that cool winter night, four girls’ voices weaving together to create a melody he wanted to memorize.

Amy plucks up the book and holds it in both hands, braids swinging against her shoulders, and declares, play-acting, “Tell the servants I want this painting purchased for me _immediately_!”

Laurie sees her then: the upward tilt of her chin, the confidence of her manner, the strength of her wrists and of her demand, even if she’s only pretending - the charm of her, cherubic yet cheeky, a child in one moment, feigning adulthood in the next.

He wonders how she came to be the girl he sees in front of him, switching tack again when her sisters rush into the room, if she’s been shaped by her position as the youngest in the family, or by being Marmee’s daughter and Meg and Jo and Beth’s sister, or if this is just Amy, if she’s no one but herself.

Amy becomes a fixture in his life, as do all members of the March household. His attitude toward her strikes a balance between Meg’s and Jo’s: half pet, half pest. Beth, so soft and so gentle, slides easily into his life in the role of the younger sister he never had. It’s easy for Laurie to wrap an arm around her, to feel her curl against his side like a kitten, easy for him to twirl her under his arm and watch the dawning of her shy smile.

With Amy, it’s not so easy. Laurie thinks, at the time, one foot dangling over the precipice of the dreaded task of growing up, the shove of Jo’s hand against his shoulder both a trial and a treasure, that nothing is easy with Amy, that Amy is not easy by nature. Like Jo, she is rarely still, but unlike Jo, her energy is not of the sort Laurie is tuned into. Wings on her back or off, she’s always flitting about, hanging off Jo’s arm begging to tag along one day, stomping through the house in a fit of petulance and rage the next. Meg displays a perfect demure blush when Laurie compliments her stitching, Jo wants to know his every thought about her stories, Beth ducks her head bashfully when he applauds after she’s played a minuet, but Amy turns her drawings away from his eyeline, presses scraps of paper close to her chest.

His childhood memories of Amy are fluttering things: hair escaping out of her braids, offering him blackberries from her cupped hands; a pipe in her mouth that she stood up on the tips of her toes to bump against the pipe in his; her key to the postbox clutched between her teeth as she hurried after the rest of them, arms full of blankets and costumes; the bare toes of her small, dainty feet stretched in front of the fire and her head against Meg’s shoulder, eyes half-closed; her fingers always poking absently at her nose, like the force of her will alone could reshape it.

She is still in only one of his memories, drenched to the bone, laid out across the ice shivering, Jo’s body draped across hers. Every bit of Jo’s bravado and Amy’s tenacity were stripped away as they clutched at each other, Amy’s sobs loud with shock, Jo’s weeping quiet and wretched. Laurie threw an arm around Jo’s neck in a quick, fierce hug before he tugged Amy gently closer to shore and scooped her up.

Jo kept pace with him as they walked to the house, one of Amy’s trembling hands closed determinedly between both of hers, and for the very first time Laurie recognized that at the depths of the souls of these two girls, the most antagonistic March sisters, they were not so unalike.

He dances with Beth and Amy at Meg’s wedding, twirling each of them under an arm simultaneously. The skirts of their dresses, pink and blue, twirl out and brush against his legs, and the flowers in their hair spin in front of his eyes. They laugh and let go of him, falling into each other. They are all caught on the edge of something, that day, though they do not yet know it.

The wedding is the last time Laurie sees Amy in Massachusetts. Not long after, she leaves for Europe with Aunt March. Orchard House is much quieter with two sisters gone, even Jo’s gregarious personality not quite enough to fill the whole space. Laurie spends his time there, and with Jo, as he always has, until one day he finds the courage to pull his heart from his chest with his bare hands and lay it at her feet, only to have her back up, moving further and further away from him, the shake of her head unyielding.

Laurie’s heartache seizes control of him. It takes him to his grandfather, his back turned on the March home. It guides him onto a ship. It lands him in London, and then in Lyon, and then in Lausanne. It follows him on lonely walks, through crowded parties. It introduces him to wine in the early afternoons. It keeps him in bed through the mornings.

And then it lets him go.

And then, Laurie finds himself in a coach, travelling to Paris.

And then -

And _then_ : Amy March, on a Parisian boulevard, rushing toward him in a blur of blue and beauty.

The Amy who throws herself into his arms with enough force that, as he gathers her in his hold, he lifts her off the ground, is a girl no longer. She’s a woman, grown and lovely and continental. She is both familiar and new, with that same confidence but more mature teasing, needling him playfully about flirting and gambling and drinking.

As she and Aunt March depart, Amy turns in the carriage, yelling after him unselfconsciously, “Dress for festivities! Top hats and silks!”

Her arms thrown in the air, he sees the girl who once stood in his home, bossing around a servant in a spontaneous game of make-believe.

It causes him inexplicably profound joy, to see that that sweet, sanguine girl is still inside the lady she’s become, beaming at him between a perfectly perched hat and the fur collar of her coat.

But the lady rules over the girl, he learns.

Amy points out his flaws and failings with merciless precision, and, to Laurie’s surprise, when he attempts an apology, he finds she does the same to herself.

“I’m giving up all my foolish artistic hopes,” she says, in the voice of a woman who won’t be moved. She tells him she will have to make a choice about who she will marry, about who she will love, and Laurie watches her composed face and the gentle fidgeting of her hands, of her fingers adorned with silver rings, and realizes in a sharp burst that Amy is not without mercy, but that in adulthood she’s tied herself firmly to what is real, has cut some - or perhaps all - of the strings that once tied her to a world of dreams and imagination. Amy, who Laurie once knew as a little girl ever-clad in her fairy wings and magic slippers, has grounded herself in the concrete, tangible world.

She hurries away at the arrival of the man she will likely marry, a union that will serve her and her family well, and Laurie watches her go with a fading smile and a lingering sensation like regret beneath his ribs, wondering how it is that the baby of them all, full of wishes and whining, grew into someone so cognizant of the consequences of each and every one of her decisions, and each and every one of his.

It’s not two days later that he sees Amy on a stroll with Fred, a parasol resting against her shoulder, her skirts swishing. It’s all very proper and decorous, her hand hooked delicately into the crook of Fred’s elbow. He catches sight of the corner of Amy’s smile and finds it cordial but placid. Laurie’s too far away to see her eyes, but he just _knows_ , in a way that causes the ache between his ribs to bloom considerably, that her eyes are neutral too, lacking her old fire, the steel of her stubbornness, the gleam of her winsome nature.

Amy looks like the subject of a portrait, every bit of her in its proper place. She does not look like an artist. She does not quite look like herself.

It’s not until the afternoon when Amy is sketching his portrait, glowing in a ray of sun, either unaware of the thrilling yet alarming grasp upon his heart that she possesses or courteously pretending not to notice, that Laurie is forced to confront all his memories of her with new eyes, finding shades of colour in them he’d never before noticed.

Amy has an expression vaguely related to panic on her face, an expression not altogether dissimilar from a distressed look he once saw from her older sister. She says _no_ when he says _yes_ , bats away the hand that reaches for her cheek, for a stray lock of her hair. The expression on her face shifts into one of anguish, which makes Laurie’s fingertips itch with an even greater desire to touch her, and she tells him he’s being _mean_ , a child again, a quiver in her lower lip, terrible hurt in her voice.

_I won’t do it. I won’t - not when I’ve spent my entire life loving you._

_My entire life._

Every fragment of every memory of Amy changes, like his entire mind has turned itself over, or perhaps righted itself for the very first time. He sees the softness of her smile when they had tea together at the Chavain and he dropped two sugar cubes into her cup, and she said in a voice he could hardly hear, _you remembered_. He sees her hesitance to take his arm as they strolled through Bois de Boulogne and he remembers how he’d thought, at the time, that she didn’t want anyone to see them and question her affection for Fred. He sees the way she slid her eyes to his face when he refilled her glass of wine after Aunt March left the table; there had been something in her gaze he couldn’t quite interpret. He remembers her after that glass of wine, lips red and laughter uninhibited, the two of them folded over the table with mirth, the ribbon in her hair brushing against his shoulder, the way she froze when he slid the ribbon between index and middle fingers and told her it was pretty, the way she was careful not to let their hands brush when she extracted it from his grasp.

And there’s more, far more than the time they’ve spent together in Paris. There’s Amy at home in Concord, telling him a rambling story about a mould of her foot that she'd attempted to make for him. There are the berries she held out to him in her hands, the sweetest of the bunch she’d collected. Her pouting refusal to participate in a theatrical after Jo proposed marrying his character to Meg’s. Amy with her hurt hand, looking at him with eyes brimming with gratitude, and Amy moments after, wanting to make him laugh. Her quiet thank-you to him for saving her life when she’d fallen through the ice, her little arms flung around him, her breath a burst of warmth against his chest. Her pink cheeks on the day Meg and John married, asking if he liked her floral crown.

A girl awake in the night when she should have been sleeping, an introduction that said she refused to be looked over or forgotten, a galaxy’s worth of stars in her eyes.

When he sees Amy again, it’s after a trip to London and back again, following a letter that brought the harrowing news of Beth’s death. They are both dressed for mourning. Amy’s countenance is grief-stricken, world-weary. She turns to him with eyes that are blank for an instant and then overfull. 

She tells him she won’t be marrying Fred, though he already knows. The tremulous exhale that accompanies her assurances that he has no obligation to speak or to act is like an arrow to Laurie’s pounding heart. He puts his hands on her beautiful, melancholy face, lifting her chin, and kisses her.

After a beat of shocked stillness, she kisses him back.

When they pull apart, her eyes move rapidly across his face before settling on his mouth. She looks dazed by all the things between them, the confluence of sorrow and joy.

“Amy March,” he says, and the emotion in his own voice surprises him. “I love you.” The look she gives him is helplessly hopeful, like she can’t quite bring herself to believe him, so he repeats it: “I love you.”

“I love you,” she echoes, sounding breathless. Her fingers fold around the lapels of his coat.

Laurie touches his nose to hers; she wrinkles her nose, that part of her face she’s always disliked, but he just leans in closer. “I’ll do things properly when we get home,” he promises her tenderly. “I’ll get down on one knee - ”

Amy gives her head a small shake, the tips of their noses brushing. “Now,” she says quietly.

He studies her face. There’s a ring he’d like to give her, but he supposes it’s not an essential part of asking for her hand. “Alright,” he says, and starts to lower his body, preparing to kneel, but Amy holds him up by his lapels, shaking her head again, more firmly this time.

“What…?” he begins, but she cuts in before he can get very far.

“Now,” she says again, and he understands her meaning in the second before she clarifies: “Let’s marry now.”

“But… Beth,” Laurie says. “And Aunt March. I haven’t spoken to your parents - I haven’t told my grandfather - ”

Amy shakes her head a third and final time. “Must you always dawdle?” she asks, tears shining along the contours of her cheeks, smile wide enough to show her teeth; exasperated, adoring. “Don’t add waiting to my agonies.”

He breathes out a laugh, mildly stunned but not displeased. He cradles her cheeks in his hands again, her tears dampening his palms. “Will you be my wife, Amy?” he asks her.

There is no hesitation, not even half a breath’s worth, before she says, “Yes,” and pulls him by his lapels into another kiss, her mouth against his almost bruising with the force of her assent.

In the drawing room of the hotel in Le Havre, there is a small table tucked into a corner, two chairs. Amy sits in one of them, a bottle of champagne and a box of macarons on the table, a candle flickering, its flame burning in her eyes. Laurie pops a macaron into his mouth, tucks the bottle beneath one arm, snatches the glasses up between two fingers, and takes Amy’s hand.

“Come on,” he tells her, and leads the way outside.

“We don’t have a chaperone!” she says, but it’s a perfunctory protest; her hand grips his tightly, and she’s keeping pace with him, nearly running.

They make their way to the gazebo in the hotel garden, the stars in the sky keeping the darkness at bay. Laurie fills the flutes with bubbling champagne and hands one to Amy, lifting his own in a toast. “To my bride,” he says, laying a hand on her waist.

She shifts closer at his touch. “To Beth,” she proposes instead.

“To Beth,” he agrees solemnly, and they drink.

He takes her hand in his as best as he can while also holding the flute, and begins slowly to dance, the hand at her waist slipping around her back. Amy rests her wrist and her glass against his shoulder as he leads her unhurriedly from one side of the gazebo to the other.

“You were right about me, you know,” he tells her.

She presses her lips together to contain a smile. “I’m right about a lot of things,” she says.

He nods. “I’m sorry I was so slow to see it,” he says, and then twirls her beneath his arm.

The champagne from his glass sloshes over her skirt, but she doesn’t seem to mind, laughing, “ _Laurie!_ ” with long-established fondness.

His name in her mouth sounds like the first notes of an aria, full of possibility.

They wed the next morning.

A chaplain is found. Aunt March is the only attendee. Amy wrestles a sunshine-yellow dress out of her luggage; Laurie wears grey trousers and a grey coat, his best white shirt. Amy slips a pink peony through his buttonhole, and he pins one to her dress. For Beth.

They say their vows in imperfect French, their hands entwined. Amy’s fingers slide over and between Laurie’s, which are all bare, all hers. He lifts her hand and kisses the spot where her ring, once his mother’s, will rest when he’s retrieved it.

Their covenant is sealed with a kiss.

In the afternoon, they board a ship bound for New York. Laurie eats dinner alone, as his wife - his _wife_ \- tends to her aunt.

He doesn’t expect to see Amy until the next day, and even then perhaps briefly, depending on Aunt March’s condition. He’s utterly astonished to hear a muted tapping on his door after nine in the evening, and to find his wife on the other side, holding the blue coat she was wearing on the day he first saw her in Paris closed around her body.

“My lady,” he says, his voice low in his throat.

Amy’s eyes drop to her slippered feet, and she looks back up at him through lowered lashes. “My lord.” A pause, and then she adds, “Aunt March is sleeping soundly.”

Laurie takes a step back, and opens the door to her.

Amy removes her coat, under which she’s wearing only a gauzy nightgown, silky blue ribbon woven through its neckline. The sight of her makes him struggle to swallow.

There is another pause, a longer one this time, and then his wife brings her eyes to his once again and peels her nightgown off her shoulders, pushes it down past her hips, and kicks aside the fabric that pools on the floor, and Laurie _sees_ Amy, every sweet inch of her, for the first time. It is everything (peaked pink nipples, the curve of her waist, the juncture of her thighs, one foot flexed against the floor in nervous expectation) and also not nearly enough (he wants to know every whorl on her fingertips, the shape of her every toe, each of the freckles behind her right knee; wants to catalogue every one of her details). He pulls his own nightshift up off over his head and puts his hands on the body she’s bared to him, hears the catch in her shallow breathing.

He lays her down on the bed, and she’s the eager, confident girl he’s always known, but when he slides a daring, savoring hand along one of her thighs, he feels her muscles trembling. He smooths his thumb over her skin in what he hopes is a comforting gesture, and whispers, “You asked me what I was doing. With life.”

Her eyes are inquiring, yearning. “You told me. You went to London - your grandfather - ”

“I did not tell it all.” He lays a kiss against her lips, and her body presses up into his as she returns it. He continues, punctuating his words by kissing his wife’s neck, her throat, her décolletage. “What I intend to do - with my life - is to love you.”

Amy pulls his face back to hers, meets a kiss with her mouth, murmurs, “My lord,” into his lips and hitches her leg up against him, and Laurie delves, slow and ardent and careful and greedy all at once, into his life’s work.

He finds her mid-morning the next day, on deck, leaning her forearms against the rail. The breeze that rises off the Atlantic teases the wisps of hair that are not contained by her bun. Her eyes are red, the corners of her mouth turned down deeply.

Laurie tucks an arm around her waist, relishes the slight shift in her body as she leans into him. He breathes in the scent of her skin and presses a long kiss against her temple.

“Beautiful,” he murmurs to her, the word falling out of his mouth without any forethought.

She turns to him, runs a finger down the bridge of his nose. “Beautiful,” she returns, a slip of a smile on her lips that fades quickly, giving way to crumpled face and a gathering of tears in her eyes.

“It’s… going home,” she says after a moment, in response to his unvoiced question. “And knowing that part of home is no longer there.”

Laurie wraps his other arm around her, pulling her body into his. Amy sobs into his chest, raw, terrible sounds that are absorbed by the crashing of the waves. He tucks his head down against hers and lets his tears fall into her golden hair.

She visits his room several times throughout the journey. Laurie likes it best when she arrives at his door in the dress she wore for dinner, and he gets to undo small, fabric-coated buttons and the bows of sashes, to pull up a sleeve and kiss the underpart of her wrist, to slide his hands beneath her skirts, to bare supple swatches of the skin of her back as he painstakingly unlaces her corset. With their clothes mingled in a mess across the floor, they fall into his bed.

Afterward, wrapped in the sheets and in each other, a pretty flush across Amy’s skin, they talk about whatever comes to mind: achingly nostalgic memories of childhood, their travels in Europe ( _I’ll take you to Switzerland someday,_ Laurie says, and Amy tells him how the heat in Rome made her so restless), his work for his grandfather. She tells him she read _Madame Bovary,_ hiding the volumes from Aunt March. He tells her about the opera house in Lyon, how delightful it was to hear contralto and soprano voices ringing between its walls, and how strangely lonely, to hear them by himself. They match up their wrists, their palms, their fingers, measuring, comparing the sizes of their hands. Before she leaves Amy stretches her body out atop his, her toes nudging against his ankles; her hair, free from its complicated, braided style, falls in curtains of soft curls that tickle his shoulders and envelop their faces as they kiss.

On the first evening she’s able to join him in the dining room, he introduces her as his wife. She’s at his door that night after only a brief detour to check on her aunt, something gloriously untamed in her eyes. She undoes the buttons of his shirt with such rapid fingers that one of them breaks off, falling to the ground.

“My lord,” she says, her knees on either side of his hips, not with subservience but with dominion, and he loves her.

Their first stop in Concord, after settling Aunt March in her home again, is to see John and Meg. They’re greeted first by the enthusiastic twins, who cling to Amy’s skirts, and then the rest of the March family spills out of the house, Meg’s hands going immediately to Amy’s, clutching tightly.

When Amy sets eyes on Marmee, she bursts into tears, falling into her mother’s arms. Laurie has the instinct to reach for her, to touch her back, but he reins it in, leaving her to her moment of grief with her mother.

“I should have been here,” Amy says into Marmee’s shoulder, her words muffled, as Meg tucks herself into the embrace as well. “I should have come home.”

“She wanted you to stay,” Marmee says, her voice thick. “It’s what she wanted.”

“Hush,” Mr. March says gently as Amy continues to cry, wrapping his arms around all three of them for a moment, dropping a kiss against the side of Amy’s head. Meg moves with him as he steps back, leaning into her father’s side; John reaches out and holds his wife’s hand.

“Oh, darling,” Marmee says on a sigh, pulling back slowly from the hug and stroking Amy’s cheek, examining her. “You look like a woman.”

“I should hope so,” Amy says, swiping at her eyes, her voice waterlogged. “I am a wife.”

At her words, everyone goes still, even Daisy and Demi, who glance up at their parents uncertainly, feeling the current of confusion in the air.

“ _What?_ ” Meg breathes, whirling around as though Fred Vaughn might be hiding near the doorway.

In the matter-of-fact tone of someone discussing the weather, or dinner plans, Amy says, “Laurie and I were married in Le Havre.”

There is another suspended moment of shock, and then Meg shrieks like she’s a girl again, flinging her arms around her sister. Laurie chances a sheepish glance at the Marmee and Mr. March, says, “My apologies - I wanted to speak with you - ”

But Marmee shakes her head, reaching out and wrapping him into one of her warm hugs. “You are already like a son to us,” she tells him. As they part, she rests her hands briefly on his upper arms and meets his eyes. “I know,” she says, “you’ll love her well.”

“I will,” he swears. “I do.”

The jolt that he sees in Jo, across her face and through her body, when he tells her - it makes him feel badly. It’s not regret, but it is chagrin; he didn’t intend to stun her. Seeing Jo again, he misses her, misses the ridiculous things they’d laugh about, misses her spirit and her vigor, misses the ease that used to exist between them, the way he could ruffle her hair, the way her elbow would poke into his ribs. The feelings she used to inspire within him, the throbbing of his heart that would sometimes drop into his stomach or rise into his throat, those are gone, and he does not miss them or the torment that accompanied them. But he misses her. He misses his friend.

She asks him if he is in love, an oh-so-familiar crease between her brows, one he remembers from days spent with her in this very attic, her head bent over paper, writing as fast as her hand would allow. Laurie tells her yes, and perhaps he should try harder to contain his smile, but it can’t be done, not when he thinks of his wife, champagne on her skirt and her unstoppable laughter, her hand tucked into his beneath a table, the dip in her waist against which his hand fits perfectly, her lips in a soft kiss against his nose.

Jo calls him _Teddy_ , as she always has, as he hopes she always will. When he asks if they can still be friends, she tells him something even better than _yes_.

She says, _of course, always_ , and he is thankful for her smile, thankful for the twists and turns of their crisscrossing paths, thankful that he’s ended up here.

Before they leave Orchard House and make their way to his grandfather’s home for the night, Amy touches the door frame, her fingers lingering against it. Laurie does not rush her, waiting until her hand falls back to her side before settling his hand at the small of her back. As they go, he touches the door frame too, a quick brush of his knuckles, a gesture of love, of appreciation for how much that house and the family within it have given him.

His grandfather is at the house, recently arrived from Boston. “Ah,” he says, stepping forward and taking Amy’s hands. “The newest member of our family.” His eyes go briefly to Laurie and then back to Amy. “A rather sudden addition.”

“Not so sudden,” Laurie says, and Amy looks at him in a way he’ll never forget, untempered ardor in her close-lipped smile, in the sparkle of her eyes.

“A merry occasion, sudden or otherwise,” his grandfather says, and Amy’s smile is earnest as she says, “Thank you, Mr. Laurence.”

“You’ll call me grandfather,” he says, both an invitation and a command. “It will be wonderful to have a woman’s touch in this household again. It was… ” he stops, briefly overcome by emotion, “lovely, when your sister would visit and play the piano.”

There is the slightest wobble in Amy’s smile. “Everything about Beth was lovely,” she agrees, and this time Laurie does not hesitate to touch her, running a hand lightly down her arm.

“I look forward to having a lively home,” Grandfather continues. “Seeing the art you’ll choose, hearing the music you’ll play… the laughter of your children.”

Amy blushes, her eyes suddenly on her shoes. Laurie watches as his grandfather gives her hands a single squeeze, releases his grasp, and bids them both goodnight before making his way, slowly but steadily, up the staircase.

When he can hear the tread of his grandfather’s footsteps overhead, Laurie touches Amy’s hot cheek, a teasing smile on his lips, and she shoots him a half-hearted glare.

“Don’t make fun,” she begins in a whisper, and he interrupts anything else she might say with a kiss.

She kisses him back fiercely, her arms twining around his neck, and Laurie stumbles through a couple steps before he has her pressed against the wall. Amy sighs against his mouth in satisfaction, and he gropes her waist, wishing he could burn every one of her corsets. He moves his hand up further, along the neckline of her blouse, undoing buttons and dipping beneath it, fingers seeking even the slightest taste of her cleavage where the tops of her breasts spill, just a little, over the corset’s boning.

Amy mewls in her throat, and then breaks the kiss, clapping a hand over her mouth, her eyes darting to the stairs as if she’s certain his grandfather will appear at any moment and catch them. Laurie can’t help but laugh at how wide her eyes are, and that gets her giggling, too. He presses her forehead to hers as they dissolve into their mutual mirth.

He’s still laughing when Amy tilts her chin up to kiss him again. Their teeth knock together. Her joy tastes sweet in his mouth.

Laurie wakes in the night, a sliver of moonlight sneaking in through the drapes, to find his wife absent from their bed. He reaches a hand out. The sheets have not yet completely cooled from the heat of her body.

He rises, stepping into trousers and pulling on a shirt, doing the buttons up as he leaves the room. He sees no sign of Amy on the second floor of the house, so he makes his way down the stairs.

He discovers her in the library, studying a still life, a solitary candle burning. “Mrs. Laurence,” he says quietly, and she turns to him.

Laurie joins her in front of the painting, brushes a kiss to the corner of her mouth. “You could not sleep?”

“No,” she says on a sigh.

“You’re thinking of Beth?” he guesses.

Amy nods. “I am always thinking of Beth,” she says. “And how strange it is, to be so horribly sad and so spectacularly happy all at once.”

They step away from the painting and settle together into one of the armchairs, squished against each other, thigh to thigh and hip to hip. Laurie wraps his arm around Amy, and she rests her cheek against his shoulder.

“Perhaps painting would help,” he suggests cautiously.

“You know I’ve given it up.”

“I know, but I don’t think you should.” He touches his lips to her forehead. “I offer my services as muse.”

He can hear the roll of her eyes, sense it in the agitated shift of her body. “I have to get this house in order,” she says, with exaggerated seriousness.

“So do that,” Laurie tells her easily. “And then paint every room.”

Amy breathes a laugh, but she doesn’t agree, so he presses on: “You were right about me, my love. Might it be that I’m right about you?”

She tilts her head back to look into his face. “I am far more wise than you.”

“I don’t doubt it,” he says, and kisses her.

She tucks her cheek back down against his shoulder and reaches for his hand, pulling it into her lap as their fingers lace together. He rubs his thumb over her knuckles.

Being with Amy in that room - it’s reminiscent of a memory he has of her from long ago, but markedly different, full of years of growth and change, infused with what they’ve forged together.

And most important of all: this time, with the gift of Amy’s hand in his, he knows far better than to let go.

fin.


End file.
